Michael Stivic
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Michael Stivic was a character on the classic 1970s American sitcom All in the Family, played by actor Rob Reiner.
The character was an Americanized version of the British original: Till Death Us Do Parts Mike, the Trotskyist "randy Scouse git" who aroused the passionate ire of his arch-conservative father-in-law Alf Garnett. For the American version of this character, the Trotskyist angle was drastically softened, and Michael Stivic became a well-intentioned but sometimes naïve and self righteous liberal of Polish-American ethnicity. He was still usually at odds with his conservative father-in-law, however, who routinely called his son-in-law "Meathead". The name "Meathead" would eventually become synonymous with the Mike Stivic character.
Exacerbating the conflicts between the perpetually unemployed grad-student Michael and his uneducated, bigoted but hard-working father-in-law Archie Bunker, was the fact that for much of the series run these two characters lived under the same roof. This close proximity meant that these seemingly diametrically-opposed people were practically living in each other's pockets, and the tension between them resulted in hilarious arguments over the simplest of topics.
As the character of Michael Stivic developed, however, it became clear that he and Archie were not entirely dissimilar. Just as Archie Bunker was clearly a satire of arch-conservative attitudes, within the context of the show Michael's character made possible a critique of the limits of liberalism, especially in the sex-based hierarchy of marriage. Michael's treatment of his wife, Gloria, played by Sally Struthers, was repeatedly called to account for his sense of superiority over her. This meant that as much as the conflicts between Archie and Michael represented conflicts between "modern" liberalism and "old-fashioned" conservatism, the conflicts between the Stivics also served to illuminate the close similarities between the liberal patriarch, Michael, and the conservative patriarch, Archie. All these themes were carried over from the British Till Death Us Do Part.
The character of Michael Stivic did not appear in the 1982 spin-off series Gloria, which starred Struthers. It was explained that Michael had left his wife and young son to live on a commune with a flower child in California.